Cloudinary Blog

ClickMechanic, a London-based, online marketplace for automobile mechanics, has chosen Cloudinary as its media-asset manager for over five years. James Wozniak, ClickMechanic’s full-stack software developer, recently talked with us about the company’s experience with Cloudinary.

“A high priority for us as an online business is to ensure that images load fast on our website”, recalled James, “We wanted to fully optimize and serve them as quickly as possible through a content delivery network (CDN) but dreaded the hassle of setup and integration.”

These days, clean and sleek e-Commerce web sites are the way to go. And that almost always includes high quality product photos with a flat white, transparent, or solid background. This is not just a passing fad. There are many practical and well-validated reasons for this choice. The graphic below summarizes a few of these:

ImageCon, the ultimate event for digital media is back and promises to be better than ever. Hundreds of developers, creatives, and marketing professionals will gather May 1-2 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

Amy Balliett is the founder and CEO of Killer Infographics, a visual-content marketing and communication agency. Today, Killer Infographics is the industry leader with Amy at the helm, devising visual strategy and running campaigns for global organizations. You can follow Amy on Twitter at @AmyBalliett and @killervizcomm.

Aaron Gustafson is a senior program manager at Microsoft and former manager of the Web Standards Project, collaborates closely with partners on Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) with a focus on cross-platform compatibility. As the author of the groundbreaking book Adaptive Web Design, Aaron regularly posts on aaron-gustafson.com.

The future of marketing depends on dynamic visual experiences. Marketers must connect with customers across multiple channels – the web, mobile, kiosks, email, search, and social as well as print and real time events. They must build brand awareness in increasingly noisy (and competitive) marketplaces. To rise above the noise, marketers must become well-versed in all things rich media -- using images, short and long form videos, and interactive contents in new ways to raise awareness, deliver powerful experiences, and boost engagement.

As Stencil’s founders were developing a web-based design tool for small businesses and other organizations that couldn’t afford to hire a graphic designer, they needed an image management solution that would render, manipulate, and resize images within each design. Cloudinary’s rich set of functionalities enabled Stencil to avoid the hassles and complexity of building their own image management product, while providing users with an easy-to-use means for doing image transformations and delivering final designs that are sized perfectly for their needs.

At MyCreativeShop, we offer templates for customers to create print designs and then print them with us or elsewhere. Brochures, flyers, postcards, and door hangers are our specialty. Early on, customers told us that they found it difficult to visualize what their designs would actually look like once printed. We needed to do better than showing boring, “flat” preview images of the finished designs to them—we needed to bring those images to life!

We live in a world where we spend increasingly more time online. As our routines change and adapt to new trends and technologies, we perform more and more of our daily activities in virtual environments. A key example of this is shopping. There are many reasons why online shopping has become so attractive for many buyers. A near endless variety of products is accessible from the palm of your hand. Customer reviews give buyers more confidence in their decisions. It's increasingly easy to search for attractive prices. And the list goes on. But a customer's desire to "touch" or "feel" the product is an interactive experience that can be hard to overcome when shopping online.

We at Cloudinary are excited to host the third annual ImageCon conference on May 1-2 in San Francisco. This year’s event will feature practical hands-on workshops and enlightening talks by thought leaders along with plenty of networking opportunities.

Part 1 of this series delves into the background for this guide. Here in part 2 are the ins and outs.

Wait, hear me out. I know, we just talked about this: Nobody is sheepishly pleading you, “Please, might we have just one more image on the page?” No, I’m not telling you to pick that particular fight. Instead, use a little smoke and mirrors to avoid requests for images that your audience needn’t render right away and might never need at all while loading them asynchronously—only as needed.